Musing on the craft while watching my favorite anime.

I'm a genre writer, generally, and one of the things our mentors tell us genre writers is to read outside the genre and to read about the craft in realms far removed from our own. A couple weeks ago I acquired what is considered *the* textbook on writing movie scripts, Robert McKee's "Screenwriting for Screenwriters: Principles of Story Design." I've learned a lot from working my way through the lessons, but the best example of what McKee is talking about so far has been the one in front of my nose. Watching episodes 19 & 20 of Mai HiME last night, I realized that the storyboarders who put the series together had a phenomenally good grip on what constitutes a beat, an event, and a scene. Mai HiME is a textbook example of why story matters long after the fanservice has stopped.

A scene "is a series of events in one continual stretch of time and usually in one place, during which one major character undergoes a transformation of a personal value." I counted every scene in episodes 19 & 20 and found that every one of them had something like that: wanting to live / willing to die; confident / anxious; knowledgable / confused; alone / loved; confessory / withdrawn; controlling / defeated. About the only weak scenes are the last one with Nao (because it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know and as a foreshadow it's too conventional) and many of Nagi's; Nagi seems to play an expository role, but then his moments may be considered part of the prior scene, pauses that readers can take by putting the book down. They're only seconds long, and I can forgive them.

I don't think this is that remarkable; after all, there's a class on this stuff. What is remarkable is that so few shows manage the kind of intensity Mai HiME has built. It all interlocks so well: the way the current Natsuki thread is clearly leading to something with Mai even though the two seem completely unrelated, for example, or the way Haruka, in her usual blind fashion, manages to become more of a sympathetic character even as we watch her devastate the person who secretly loves her.

I long ago decided that I didn't watch "anime"; I watched stories I liked, and more of those come through in anime than in most television. The last story where I felt this kind of intensity was season three of "24". And somehow, Mai HiME manages to feel less contrived than the Keifer Sutherland vehicle. I'm not sure how it managed that; perhaps the willing suspension of disbelief is greater because it's animated.

Mai HiME episodes 22 & 23...

This is an amazing show. I recommend it. The only problem is that the company that owns it will have trouble licensing it.

Nobody will want to watch it twice.

Half-baked thinking: What's your brand?

This afternoon, sparked by a television show (yeah, this one, what did you expect?) I started thinking back on the training I had received as a member of the Franklin Covey dayplanner cult. CompuServe was big on this; we received three hours a year of "refresher" training in how to use the big, bulky thing, which I carried with me everywhere. These days I'm down to a David Allen project list and a calendar, blessed be, on a Palm V that fits in my pocket.

But sometimes, Allen recommends that you do the Covey thing-- not as often as Covey would like, which is every week, every day if you can-- but once every couple of months, one should step back from the immediate task of Getting Things Done and consider one's objectives, one's goals and, in the Covey terminology, one's roles.

I dug up my old list and there, at the top, was father, then husband, employee, writer, programmer, and adviser. I've had to drop the bottom one, for I no longer hand out unsolicited advice on agony blogs and newsgroups. There simply is not time enough.

As I was thinking about this list of roles, the "who am I" question came up and then I realized I had another role: blogger. And then it clicked: I'm Elf Fucking Sternberg, I've been on the Internet for seventeen years, which is longer than some of my readers have been alive, and I am a brand.

But what is the Elf Sternberg brand about? What do you get for brand loyalty? This is the question I must figure out. How do I build brand integrity into the name "Elf Sternberg"? Is it a multiple of brands: is there one about a secularist father trying to raise children, another about the erstwhile programmer, another about the relentless writer, another about the wine and anime and chocolate and cooking fanatic? Do they need separate identities? What are the deliverables for each, and how do I improve the quality of those deliverables?

This is something I will probably be spending some energy thinking about, because I perceive that it is valuable to me. I have only a short time on this Earth, my transhumanist optimism notwithstanding, and I need to do something with it.

As a short interim, I really, really wish that LiveJournal had tagging. "This post is about" and a collection of one-word tags that would let people filter. "Show me all of Elf's posts about anime" or "Show me all of Elf's posts about fatherhood" would totally rock! as a feature.